The present invention is in the technical field of firearms. More particularly, the present invention is in the technical field of electronic and electro-mechanical triggering mechanism used in handheld or mounted gun systems.
Conventional firearm's triggering mechanism (such as those used in the handheld or mounted gun) largely use only mechanical power to strike on the percussion cup in the centerfire cartridges.
Few conventional guns do use electrical power applied using the firing pin or fixed electrode on the face of the bolt to central percussion cup primer. Systems for electrically igniting the propellant charge in gun-fired ammunition have long been known in the prior art. For example, the U.S. Pat. No. 3,748,770 describes one such arrangement where the bolt consists of a fixed central firing pin acting as a power contact to fire the primer having an electrically conductive priming mixture in the percussion cup. This system cannot be used to fire the electrodes of a Hybrid primer because they are not located inside the percussion cup but are arranged in an insulated base around it. Similar to the U.S. Pat. No. 3,748,770 there are other patents (for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,755,056A) which aim to trigger the centrally located primer in percussion cup using energized firing pin. In U.S. Pat. No. 5,329,840 the FIG. 1 explains the working of such systems.
These firearms however do not have the triggering mechanism to fire the Hybrid Primer cartridges since applying the electric power to the percussion cup in a Hybrid primer will not energize the electrodes around it which are the key to achieve multiple triggering points within the cartridge case. The Hybrid Primer referred here is a new patented primer design (U.S. Pat. No. 9,546,857) which consists of a centrally located conventional pressure-sensitive chemical primer housed in a percussion cup surrounded by electrical primer consisting of insulating base housing multiple electrode pins of varying lengths housed in the holes or slots in the base (similar to bristles of a tooth-brush). When high-voltage electrical pulses are applied on these electrodes then the plasma or electric arcs are generated at multiple points along the length of the cartridge burning the propellant efficiently.